If you’ve ever spoken to a media buyer about advertising on television, you’ll have heard them talk about TVRs within the first couple of minutes. It’s the measure that the whole business of buying airtime is built on, and it’s also the bit that leaves most people nodding politely without really following.
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There’s less to it than the jargon suggests, and once you’ve seen how a TVR is worked out, most of what a media buyer says about audiences and prices falls into place.
What is a TVR?
TVR stands for television rating, and one TVR is one per cent of the audience you’re trying to reach, seeing your advert once.
The important part of that sentence is “the audience you’re trying to reach”. A TVR is always measured against a particular group of people, such as all adults, or women aged 16 to 34, and not against everybody with a television. It means the same break has a different rating for every audience, so a weekday afternoon quiz that’s watched by a good share of retired people, and by very few people in their twenties, could be a sound buy for one business and a poor one for another.
A simple example
The numbers here are made up to keep the sums easy. Imagine you’re advertising in a region that has one million adults in it, and adults are the audience you’ve chosen. If your advert is shown once, in a break watched by 50,000 of those adults, that showing has delivered 5 TVRs, because 50,000 is five per cent of a million.
Over a campaign, the TVRs from every showing are added together. So if your advert goes out forty times and those showings add up to 200 TVRs, you’ve bought the equivalent of every adult in the region seeing your advert twice.
Why 100 TVRs doesn’t mean everybody saw it
That figure is only an equivalent, though, because in real life 200 TVRs doesn’t mean every adult saw the advert exactly twice. Some people will have seen it six times, some once, and some not at all, because we don’t all watch the same amount of television.
That’s why media buyers talk about two other things as well. Reach, sometimes called coverage, is the percentage of your audience who saw the advert at least once. Frequency is how many times, on average, those people saw it, and you may hear it called OTS, which stands for opportunities to see. Multiply one by the other and you get back to the TVRs, so 200 TVRs could mean that half of your audience saw the advert four times each, or that four in five of them saw it, at an average of two and a half times each. Those are quite different campaigns, which is why a TVR figure on its own tells you how much airtime you’ve got, and says nothing about how it has been spread.
A good media plan balances the two, because reaching lots of people once isn’t usually enough for them to remember you, and reaching a small group twenty times is a waste of money. Getting that balance takes some planning, since the people who watch the most television collect showings very quickly, while the lightest viewers are the hardest to reach at all.
Who does the measuring?
All of this depends on somebody counting who was watching, and in the UK that’s done by an organisation called Barb. It tracks what a panel of households across the country are watching, and those figures are what the whole industry uses to work out how many people saw each break. Barb measures more than a hundred different audiences, and the broadcasters sell airtime against a smaller set of the most commonly used ones.
Because the figures record what people did watch, nobody knows what a particular break will deliver until after it has gone out. A media plan is therefore a forecast, and the report at the end of the campaign shows what was achieved against it.
How TVRs turn into a price
A TVR is a percentage, and one per cent of the adults in London is a great many more people than one per cent of the adults in a smaller region, so airtime is priced on the number of people behind the percentage. The measure is called cost per thousand, or CPT, which is the cost of your advert being seen a thousand times by people in your chosen audience, and each of those viewings is called an impact.
Going back to the made-up region of a million adults, 200 TVRs works out at two million impacts. If the cost per thousand were £5, that airtime would cost £10,000. The figures are invented, but the sum is the same one your media buyer will be doing, and it’s how they compare one channel or time of day with another.
Why the same airtime costs different amounts
The cost per thousand isn’t fixed. According to Thinkbox, the marketing body for commercial TV in the UK, it moves with supply and demand: the supply is the number of people watching, and the demand is the amount of money advertisers are trying to spend. Prices are set month by month, and each channel has its own average for each audience. That average is a benchmark, and what an advertiser really pays is negotiated against it, which is one of the places where the buying power of a media buyer counts. A few things push the price up or down:
- The time of year. January tends to be the cheapest month, because lots of people are watching and fewer advertisers are spending. The run-up to Christmas, from September to November, tends to be the most expensive.
- The economy. When money is tight, people stay in and watch more television, and businesses tend to cut their advertising. More viewers and fewer advertisers both push the price down, which is why a downturn can be a good time to be on TV.
- Big events. Major sport and the most popular shows bring in huge audiences, but so many advertisers want to be in them that the price goes up, not down.
- The region. Each TV region has its own price. London is the most expensive, and other regions cost less.
- The time of day. The evening peak costs the most, and daytime and late night cost less.
- The audience. Some audiences are harder to reach than others, because they watch less television, and those cost more per thousand than a broad audience such as all adults.
- The length of the advert. A 30-second advert is the standard, and every other length is priced against it. A 60-second advert costs double. Shorter ones cost less, but not quite in proportion: a 10-second advert is about half the price of a 30, and a 20-second one is around 80 to 85 per cent.
We’ve gone into the reasoning behind the first four in a separate piece on why airtime costs more in some months than others, and the time of day has an article of its own.
Where TVRs don’t come into it
All of this describes ordinary broadcast television, where everybody watching a channel in the same region sees the same break at the same moment. With AdSmart from Sky and the broadcasters’ streaming services, such as ITVX, your advert goes to chosen households, or to viewers who are each watching at a different time, so there’s no single audience to take a percentage of. Those are generally bought by the number of times the advert is shown, which you’ll hear called impressions, and if your campaign uses both, your media buyer will bring them together in one plan.
Why TVRs can affect the cost of making your advert too
There’s one more reason TVRs matter, and it has nothing to do with the price of airtime. The visual artists who appear in an advert, the voiceover and even the music are often licensed for a certain length of time and a certain size of audience. So a campaign that delivers a lot of TVRs can cost more to make, as well as more to air.
It’s one of the reasons we ask about the size of your campaign early on, and it’s explained on our TV ad costs page.
Do you need to understand all this?
You don’t need to be able to do any of it yourself, because your media buyer will do the sums, and a good one will explain what you’re getting in plain English. It does help to know what the words mean, though, so that when somebody tells you a campaign will deliver 300 TVRs with 60% reach, you know what you’re being offered and can ask the right questions. Dividing the first figure by the second tells you that the people who see the advert will see it five times on average, and from there you can ask whether that’s right for what the advert is asking people to do, and what could be done to reach some of the four in ten who won’t see it at all.
Our jargon buster covers the other terms you’re likely to hear, and our media buying page explains how airtime gets planned and bought. When you’d like to see the sums done for your own area, tell us what you have in mind and our media buying partners can put real figures on them.
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